McLellan downplays Petersen drama, praises call-ups Fagemo and Bjornfot, and hints at Madden, Copley plans

Last updated Dec 5, 2022 Edit Source

• News post

• Jon Rosen

The LA Kings snapped a three-game home losing streak and showed signs of patching up their leaky defense with a 5-3 win over Arizona that stabilized – for one night, at least – the surging tide of goals against.

• Cal Petersen
• Pheonix Copley
• Samuel Fagemo
• Tobias Bjornfot
• Tyler Madden

• Todd McLellan

# Todd McLellan

We didn’t play out of our skin to try and win it. We played in our skin to do it.

[Tobias Bjornfot] plays well when he uses his legs – when he’s active, and he’s up, and he’s back, and closing. If he’s just kind of standing around waiting for things to come to him, it doesn’t go real well, and tonight he used his legs really well. Him and Spence have been a real solid pair. Their professionalism, the way they approach the day, is elite. They’re determined to get better, and then when they play, they’re up against the top players at that level for many minutes a night, and they played very well on both sides of the puck.

That’s the best I’ve seen Sammy play this year.

[Pheonix Copley]’s part of our team. We’ve got a really good goaltender in Jonathan Quick who’s played over 700 games, I believe. Didn’t we just celebrate that? So, somebody to play minutes, and good minutes, strong minutes, confident minutes for us is really important. So that’s what we think of him, that’s how we’ll use him.

[Tyler Madden]’s on our roster right now. We may wake up tomorrow and he may not be on our roster. I don’t know where we’re going with any of this. But if they’re on our roster, we’re training them to play, and he deserves to be here. He’s had a good season so far, and we’ll see how it plays out.

Not really. I didn’t feel that one bit. I felt like we were going to come out and play well. And I’m not just saying that. I felt good about our group. I think the last 48 hours, it was different, but it isn’t as dramatic as maybe I feel from the line of questioning. We’re not happy that Cal’s in Ontario right now. None of us are. We all take responsibility for that, but we’ve got to move on. The fact that the manager came in to talk to us, that happens. I don’t think it’s as dramatic as anybody in here maybe thinks it was.

Those are just guys making a real poor play at a critical time, and that happens on every team. We’re just getting a few too many of them right now. For as much as it could be deemed a negative signal to many, it could also be a positive one, because there are some things the team is doing well, and … we recognize those, but there’s also things that need to get cleaned up.

# Drew Doughty

No, I didn’t see it last game, that’s for sure. Every single player needs to buy in to wanting to play a little bit of defense first. A lot of forwards, they want to score goals, and we need them to do that, but as a unit, as a team, to win hockey games, we need to play good defensive hockey, and we need to be able to rely on every single guy to be put in a spot to play that way.